Gingrich says rivals' criticism taking a toll (AP)

DES MOINES, Iowa ? Newt Gingrich tried to quiet unrelenting campaign criticism that he acknowledged had taken a toll as Mitt Romney stepped up insider attacks Saturday in hopes of regaining front-runner status with the first presidential vote less than two weeks away.

Gingrich, the former House speaker enjoying a late surge in the polls, pledged to correct what he said were his rivals' inaccurate claims about him. Romney, the ex-Massachusetts governor looking for a rebound, portrayed Gingrich as a well-heeled lobbyist since his service in Congress and predicted that conservative voters will reject Gingrich as they learn more about his lengthy Washington record.

"I'm going to let the lawyers decide what is and what is not lobbying, but when it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, typically it's a duck," Romney said.

With the Iowa caucuses Jan. 3 up for grabs, most candidates are redoubling their efforts heading into the holidays, when voters generally tune out the race.

Gingrich is their prime target. Last week alone, anti-Gingrich ads from a Romney ally outspent Gingrich by an 8-to-1 margin on television.

Gingrich cited "the extraordinary negativity of the campaign" during a call from Washington with Iowa supporters. He said he was inclined to hold teleconferences every few days so people can discuss ideas and his campaign can "encourage them to raise any of these things that you get in the mail that are junk and dishonest."

"I'll be glad to personally answer, so you're hearing it from my very own lips," he said in the forum. "We don't have our advertising versus their advertising, but you get to ask me directly."

Romney campaigned in early-voting South Carolina, where tea party activists have given Gingrich a strong lead in polls. Romney told reporters that many voters now are just beginning to pay attention to the race and will turn on Gingrich after they learn about his time in Washington and his role with mortgage company Freddie Mac, a quasi-government agency.

Gingrich's consulting firm collected $1.6 million from the company. Gingrich insists he did not lobby for them and only provided advice.

"I think as tea partyers concentrate on that, for instance, they'll say, `Wow, this really isn't the guy that would represent our views,'" Romney said after a town hall meeting with South Carolina Rep. Tim Scott. "Many tea party folks, I believe, are going to find me to be the ideal candidate."

Gingrich said the attacks on his record have been brutal, but he insisted they are exaggerated.

"I just want to set the record straight," Gingrich told his Iowa backers. "We were paid annually for six years, so the numbers you see are six years of work. Most of that money went to pay overhead ? for staff, for other things. It didn't go directly to me. It went to the company that provided consulting advice."

It's a distinction without a difference, his rivals have said. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann continued to criticize his tenure as a consultant and Texas Rep. Ron Paul continued an ad accusing him of "serial hypocrisy" for taking Freddie Mac's checks.

During a Friday appearance on Jay Leno's late-night television show, Paul also turned on Bachmann.

"She doesn't like Muslim. She hates them," said Paul, who routinely clashes with his rivals over foreign policy. "She wants to go get them."

Bachmann told reporters in Estherville that was not true.

"I don't hate Muslims. I love the American people," she said. "As president of the United States, my goal will be to keep America safe, free and sovereign."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry rumbled through rural Iowa on a bus tour. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum stuck to a plan that has won him the honor of spending the most time in the state, yet has not yet translated into support in polls.

Iowa's largest newspaper, The Des Moines Register, announced it would publish its presidential endorsement in Sunday editions. In 2008, the paper backed Sen. John McCain, the eventual GOP nominee who came up short in Iowa's caucuses.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who early on decided against competing in Iowa, was campaigning in New Hampshire. Huntsman, who also served as President Barack Obama's ambassador to China, has kept his focus on New Hampshire, where independent voters are the largest bloc and can vote in either party's primary.

As the Iowa vote neared, Gingrich's decision to take the weekend off from campaigning raised eyebrows given his rivals' busy schedules. Gingrich called the decision "pacing."

Gingrich has prided himself on a nontraditional campaign, but his advantages in the polls could shift if the only exposure to Gingrich comes through rivals' negative ads.

Gingrich's campaign manager noted the onslaught in a fundraising pitch to donors.

"With Newt's opponents spending $9 million on attack ads in Iowa, we need to quickly ramp up our messaging," Michael Krull said Saturday.

Anti-Romney ads, courtesy of Romney allies, dominate in Iowa. The Restore Our Future political action committee spent almost $790,000 on commercials against Romney last week alone. Gingrich, by comparison, spent roughly 100,000 on broadcast and cable ads.

That looked to continue into the final week before the Christmas holiday.

Romney, who has kept Iowa at arm's length after investing heavily here four years ago only to come up short. His advisers note they have kept in touch with supporters of his 2008 campaign that came in second place in Iowa.

___

Hunt reported from Charleston, S.C.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111217/ap_on_el_pr/us_gop_campaign

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Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora dies at 70 (Reuters)

PRAIA, Cape Verde (Reuters) ? The Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora, known as the "barefoot diva," has died at age 70, according to reports over the weekend.

The singer, who brought the melancholy music known as "morna" to international audiences and received a Grammy in 2003, was hospitalized on Friday with respiratory failure, heart problems and pulmonary edema. She died at dawn on Saturday in her hometown of Mindelo on the island of Sao Vicente, Cape Verde's state broadcaster reported on its website.

Evora had canceled several concerts before announcing the end of her career on September 23 because of health problems. In recent years she had undergone a number of operations, including open-heart surgery in May 2010.

Her last tour was scheduled to take her to Armenia, Romania, France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

According to her official website, Evora began her singing career in the 1960s, and was known for singing morna, songs that told sentimental stories of disappointment and expressed the remoteness of the archipelago of Cape Verde, in the Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of Africa.

She was born on August 27, 1941, and started singing in the bars of Mindelo as a teen, when Cape Verde was still part of Portugal. In 1985 she performed in Lisbon, which led to an invitation to record in Paris.

Her first album, 1988's "La Diva Aux Pieds Nus," named after her preference for performing without shoes, brought Evora her first international success as a recording artist.

In the early 1990s she became a leading figure in the world-music scene with the albums "Mar Azul" and "Miss Perfumado," featuring songs such as "Sodade" and "Cesaria."

Since then she filled concert halls around the world and became the best-known export of Cape Verde, singing mainly in the Creole language of her native country.

After receiving several Grammy nominations, she was awarded the prize in the World Music category for her 2003 album "Voz d'Amor."

Her last studio album, "Nha Sentimento," was released in 2009.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/celebrity/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111218/people_nm/us_cesariaevora

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"X Factor" ties "Big Bang" repeat as CBS wins ratings night (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? On a Thursday night when ratings were down overall, Fox's "The X Factor" tied a "Big Bang Theory" repeat and "Person of Interest" on CBS. CBS took an overall victory, according to preliminary numbers.

"The X Factor" was down slightly from last week, drawing a 2.8 rating/8 share in the adults 18-49 demographic, with 9.6 million total viewers. A "Bones" repeat followed.

On CBS, a repeat of "The Big Bang Theory" at 8 drew a 2.8/9 with 10.1 million total viewers. "Rules of Engagement" at 8:30 received a 2.7/8 with 9.7 million total viewers. "Person of Interest" at 9 performed flat with last week, scoring a 2.8/9 and 12.7 million total viewers. "The Mentalist," at 10 had a 2.7/7 and 12.9 million total viewers, making it the most-watched show of the night. CBS was the highest-rated network of the night, averaging a 2.8/8.

ABC's "A Charlie Brown Christmas" at 8 yielded a 1.8/5 and 6.4 million total viewers. "The Year With Katie Couric" at 9 received a 1.5/4 and 5.5 million total viewers.

NBC ran repeats throughout the night, save for a new episode of its shelved crime series "Prime Suspect" at 10, which dropped 38 percent, hitting a season low with a 0.8/2 and 3.6 million total viewers.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tv/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111216/tv_nm/us_tvratings

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Senate confirms U.S. envoy to Russia (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? The Obama administration's top adviser on Russia policy, Michael McFaul, was approved by the Senate on Saturday to serve as the country's ambassador to Moscow.

McFaul was a leading architect of the Democratic administration's "reset" policy of improving relations with Russia and helped negotiate a new U.S.-Russia nuclear arms reduction treaty.

The former Stanford University professor replaces John Beyrle, who was appointed in 2008 by former President George W. Bush. McFaul's confirmation had been temporarily delayed over concerns among Republicans about possible cuts to nuclear weapons spending.

(Reporting By Rachelle Younglai)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/uscongress/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111217/pl_nm/us_usa_mcfaul

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HBT: Blue Jays reportedly make highest bid for Darvish

As we noted last night, nothing will be official until next week, but the New York Post is reporting that the Blue Jays have made the highest bid for negotiating rights for Japanese sensation Yu Darvish.

The Post reports that ?according to several sources with knowledge of the situation,? the Blue Jays owner, Rogers Communications, ordered the team to bid upwards of $40-50 million for the rights to negotiate with Darvish. If they are the winners, they would then have 30 days to get him under contract, which could cost an additional $75 million, many speculate.

The Blue Jays landing Darvish would make the AL East pretty interesting next year. The Jays were just a .500 team in 2011, but they have a core of great talent with Jose Bautista, Brett Lawrie ? who would get more than 43 games in 2012 ? and Ricky Romero.

With Darvish in the fold, the Jays would officially obtain ?frisky? status, no?

Source: http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/12/16/report-the-blue-jays-are-the-high-bidders-for-yu-darvish/

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Berenson to return to U.S. for first time after jail in Peru (Reuters)

LIMA (Reuters) ? Lori Berenson, a New Yorker who spent 15 years in Peruvian prisons for aiding Marxist insurgents, will visit the United States as early as this weekend for the first time since her 1995 arrest, officials and her family said on Friday.

Berenson, 42, the mother of a 2-year-old boy, was paroled last year after serving most of a 20-year sentence. At the time of her release, Peru's government resisted calls to commute the rest of her sentence so she could return permanently to the United States. Peruvian officials say she must return to Lima by January 11.

Berenson's father, Mark, said he was grateful Peruvian authorities allowed her to travel and that she would return to Peru because she did not want to break the law.

"I'm glad she has a chance to be here for my 70th birthday," Mark Berenson told Reuters in New York. "I'm looking forward to being with my grandson and playing with him."

A student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming involved in social justice issues in Latin America, Berenson was pulled off a bus in Lima 16 years ago and charged with belonging to the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, an urban guerrilla group.

The MRTA was active in the 1980s and 1990s when a larger insurgency, the Maoist Shining Path, also tried to topple the state.

While behind bars, she became known as an accomplished baker, was shown participating in talent shows of inmates, and had a child with her lawyer, Anibal Apari, a former member of the MRTA.

She told Reuters last year that life outside prison was "much harder than I thought."

Her neighbors in Lima shouted insults at her after her release in a country where people are still traumatized by memories of a long civil war that killed 69,000 people.

Berenson was never convicted of participating in violent acts, but was found guilty of providing support to the MRTA. She says she was imprisoned for renting a house where MRTA members stayed.

"It would be nice if people didn't see me as the face of terrorism, but I can't change that. I live with it. It's not easy, especially because I don't think that I'm a terrorist," she said at the time.

A military tribunal initially sentenced her to life in prison using counterterrorism laws. She was retried later in a civilian court and her sentence was reduced after pressure from her parents, human rights groups and the U.S. government.

(Reporting By Enrique Mandujano and Terry Wade in Lima and Michelle Nichols in New York; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/latam/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111216/us_nm/us_peru_berenson

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Kashiwa Reysol head coach Nelsinho: We gave Santos a hard time in 3-1 defeat at Club World Cup

Goal : ?? Kashiwa Reysol head coach Nelsinho praised his team's effort in the aftermath of their 3-1 defeat to Santos at Toyota Stadium in Wednesday night's Club World Cup semi-final.

Reysol went into the second half trailing 2-0 due to goals scored by Neymar and Borges, but brought themselves back into the game thanks to Hiroki Sakai's header following a corner kick.

The J-League champions eventually succumbed to defeat when Danilo expertly bent a free kick around the wall and past goalkeeper Takanori Sugeno to complete the scoring.

"Tonight we created many good chances, but we also committed some mistakes and conceded two early goals," admitted Nelsinho in the post-match press conference.

"We conceded a little space, and Neymar scored once, almost twice. They were good in making use of their opportunities."

Reysol also created some decent goalscoring opportunities themselves, as players such as Jorge Wagner and Hideaki Kitajima put the Santos defenders under a surprising amount of pressure.

Source: http://foreign.peacefmonline.com/sports/201112/84645.php

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Less knowledge, more power: Uninformed can be vital to democracy, study finds

[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 15-Dec-2011
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Morgan Kelly
mgnkelly@princeton.edu
609-258-5729
Princeton University

Contrary to the ideal of a completely engaged electorate, individuals who have the least interest in a specific outcome can actually be vital to achieving a democratic consensus. These individuals dilute the influence of powerful minority factions who would otherwise dominate everyone else, according to new research published in the journal Science.

A Princeton University-based research team reports Dec. 16 that this finding based on group decision-making experiments on fish, as well as mathematical models and computer simulations can ultimately provide insights into humans' political behavior.

The researchers report that in animal groups, uninformed individuals as in those with no prior knowledge or strong feelings on a situation's outcome tend to side with and embolden the numerical majority. Relating the results to human political activity, the study challenges the common notion that an outspoken minority can manipulate uncommitted voters.

"The classic view is that uninformed or uncommitted individuals may allow extreme views to proliferate. We found that might not be the case," said lead author Iain Couzin, a Princeton assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. He and his co-authors found that even a small population of indifferent individuals act as a counterbalance to the minority whose passion even can cause informed individuals in the majority to waver and restore majority rule.

"We show that when the uninformed participate, the group can come to a majority decision even in the face of a powerful minority," Couzin said. "They prevent deadlock and fragmentation because the strength of an opinion no longer matters it comes down to numbers. You can imagine this being a good or bad thing. Either way, a certain number of uninformed individuals keep that minority from dictating or complicating the behavior of the group."

Of course this effect has its limits, Couzin said. He and his co-authors also found that if the number of uninformed becomes too high, a group ceases to function coherently, with neither the majority nor the minority taking the lead. "Eventually, noise dominates because there just aren't enough informed individuals to guide the group," he said.

Parallels to humans

An important aspect of the findings, said Couzin, is that they are based on experiments on groups of fish, as well as mathematical models and computer simulations. Though the idea of uninformed populations benefiting the democratic process seems counterintuitive, the experimental results suggest that this dynamic is a naturally occurring decision-making process, he said.

The experiments involved golden shiners, a fish prone to associating the color yellow with a food reward, Couzin said. The researchers trained groups of golden shiners to swim toward a blue target, while smaller groups were trained to follow their natural predilection for a yellow target. When the two groups were placed together, the minority's stronger desire for the yellow target dominated the group's behavior. As fish with no prior training (the uninformed individuals) were introduced, however, the fish increasingly swam toward the majority-preferred blue target, the researchers report.

"We think of being informed as good and being uninformed as bad, but that's a human construct. Animal groups are rarely in a fractious state and we see consensus a lot," said Couzin, who studies the behavior and communication behind animal movement, swarming and flocking.

"These experiments indicate there is an evolutionary function to being uninformed that perhaps is as active as being informed," he said. "Animals may be equally adaptable to simply going with the majority in certain circumstances because having that quick decision-making capability is beneficial for survival. We shouldn't think of it as a bad thing, but look at advantages animals exhibit to being uninformed in natural circumstances."

Donald Saari, a professor of mathematics and economics at the University of California-Irvine who studies voting systems, said he sees parallels to the Princeton-led work in markets and politics.

Highly informed economic forecasters and political activists frequently lose out to the masses of consumers and regular voters who base decisions on personal preferences and reasons more than on expertise, said Saari, who is familiar with the Science report but had no role in it.

For instance, he said, the arc from minority domination to pluralism to the potential degeneration into "noise," as described in the Princeton study, can be seen in the American electoral system.

A forceful minority can dominate in circumstances that attract the more politically inclined, such as midterm elections and primaries. In more popular elections, however, that influence wanes as less passionate people participate. Situations in which a candidate's personality or personal life takes precedent over policy positions in voters' minds could be an equivalent to the breakdown in direction Couzin and his co-authors found when there is a glut of uninformed individuals, Saari said.

"This study gives us a new interpretation of group decision making that really flies in the face of previous opinions. We usually assume that a highly opinionated and forceful group is going to sway everyone," Saari said.

"What we have we here is something very different," he said. "It doesn't say whether or not the consensus it good, it just provides a way of understanding when and how the consensus changes. If the numbers of the uninformed, or people who don't have a strong opinion, are large enough, that dilutes the effect of the highly opinionated or knowledgeable in the final outcome. Quite frankly, I think it's because the highly opinionated are not in the center and the uninformed, to a large extent, are."

Saari said that there might be an additional consideration or factor that uninformed individuals bring to the group process rather than mere devotion to the majority opinion.

"These results raise a lot of questions for me and present another way of thinking about and coming up with explanations for what we observe in group dynamics," he said.

"I think the effect the uninformed have is much more than just number-counting plurality and that they're offering something else," Saari said. "Why are the fish with no 'opinion' more effective toward taking the group toward plurality than the fish that only had some opinion? What is that additional dynamic, what are the real contributions of the uninformed? I don't know what it is, but I do know it's worth investigating."

The power of the uninformed in simulations and reality

The researchers developed three models that initially revealed and described how uninformed individuals restore popular power. The modeling work was based on a computational tool developed in Couzin's lab that predicts and explains animal group behavior based on various forms of social interaction among group members. Couzin first reported the model in the journal Nature in 2005.

For the current work in Science, Couzin worked with, from Princeton, second author Christos Ioannou, a former postdoctoral fellow in Couzin's lab who is now a research fellow at the University of Bristol; postdoctoral researcher Colin Torney and doctoral student Andrew Hartnett, both in Couzin's lab; and professors Simon Levin, the Moffett Professor of Biology and co-author of the 2005 Nature paper, and Naomi Leonard, the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The team also included Gven Demirel, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems; Thilo Gross, an engineering lecturer at the University of Bristol; and Larissa Conradt, a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge.

In this project, Couzin used his model to first simulate animal groups of different sizes with a majority and a minority population, each with a differing preference to move in a certain direction. He added the factor of how strongly the respective groups felt about their preference, a variable he could increase or decrease.

As expected, the researchers report, if the majority's preference was just as strong or stronger than the minority's, the group moved in the direction the majority favored. But when the intensity of the minority's preference increased, the animals as a whole frequently caved to that group's desires. In the groups with the strongest minority preference, the animals always went with the minority.

Couzin then added a third group, the uninformed, that had no preference on the direction to move. The model showed that even the presence of one or two uninformed individuals caused an immediate change in the group's behavior. The uninformed individuals were ultimately most effective in the groups with the least committed minority and those with the smallest total number of members. But even in groups with the most adamant minority, the majority took back control with less than 10 uninformed individuals present.

"Consensus naturally emerges in these models once uninformed individuals are introduced," Couzin said. "There is a sharp transition from minority to majority control. At a certain threshold, only a few uninformed individuals can alter the entire outcome of group decisions."

Mathematical models one created by Demirel and Gross, another by Torney helped explain the mysterious pull of the uninformed individuals. These models were based on social processes in human groups, such as how conventions become established, or how people influence each other's opinions, Couzin said.

The calculations indicated that during the decision-making process, all individuals have a tendency to follow what they perceive as the predominant view, but opinionated individuals are more resistant to social pressure, Couzin explained. This reluctance to compromise manipulates the perception of what is popular, meaning that the strong convictions of the minority can make their view seem dominant. Uninformed individuals, having no strong opinion or preference, tend to inhibit this process because they respond quickly to numerical rather than semantic differences and curb the influence of forceful individuals.

The models were used to design the experiments with the golden shiners, which Ioannou, who was not aware of the hypothesis being tested, conducted over a three-month period. The majority group of fish trained to swim toward the blue target consisted of six fish; five fish made up the strongly "opinionated" minority group, which was driven by a natural attraction to the color yellow.

As in the simulations, the minority group won out when uninformed individuals were not present and the fish swam toward the yellow target in slightly more than 80 percent of the trials where only the minority and majority groups were present.

The untrained fish, however, which were introduced in groups of five or 10, consistently put the group on course toward the blue target, Couzin explained. When five were added, the whole group went toward the blue target half the time. In trials with 10 untrained fish present, the fish made their way to the blue target nearly 70 percent of the time.

"We saw that the counterweight to a powerful minority can come from the least expected population the uninformed," Couzin said.

"It was extremely rewarding to see this counterintuitive prediction play out in reality with living organisms," he said. "Our work is a simplification of reality, but it allows the underlying mechanics of this type of decision making to be observed and understood."

###

The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Searle Scholars Program, the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research, the Royal Society and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency administered by the U.S. Department of Defense.


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[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 15-Dec-2011
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Morgan Kelly
mgnkelly@princeton.edu
609-258-5729
Princeton University

Contrary to the ideal of a completely engaged electorate, individuals who have the least interest in a specific outcome can actually be vital to achieving a democratic consensus. These individuals dilute the influence of powerful minority factions who would otherwise dominate everyone else, according to new research published in the journal Science.

A Princeton University-based research team reports Dec. 16 that this finding based on group decision-making experiments on fish, as well as mathematical models and computer simulations can ultimately provide insights into humans' political behavior.

The researchers report that in animal groups, uninformed individuals as in those with no prior knowledge or strong feelings on a situation's outcome tend to side with and embolden the numerical majority. Relating the results to human political activity, the study challenges the common notion that an outspoken minority can manipulate uncommitted voters.

"The classic view is that uninformed or uncommitted individuals may allow extreme views to proliferate. We found that might not be the case," said lead author Iain Couzin, a Princeton assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. He and his co-authors found that even a small population of indifferent individuals act as a counterbalance to the minority whose passion even can cause informed individuals in the majority to waver and restore majority rule.

"We show that when the uninformed participate, the group can come to a majority decision even in the face of a powerful minority," Couzin said. "They prevent deadlock and fragmentation because the strength of an opinion no longer matters it comes down to numbers. You can imagine this being a good or bad thing. Either way, a certain number of uninformed individuals keep that minority from dictating or complicating the behavior of the group."

Of course this effect has its limits, Couzin said. He and his co-authors also found that if the number of uninformed becomes too high, a group ceases to function coherently, with neither the majority nor the minority taking the lead. "Eventually, noise dominates because there just aren't enough informed individuals to guide the group," he said.

Parallels to humans

An important aspect of the findings, said Couzin, is that they are based on experiments on groups of fish, as well as mathematical models and computer simulations. Though the idea of uninformed populations benefiting the democratic process seems counterintuitive, the experimental results suggest that this dynamic is a naturally occurring decision-making process, he said.

The experiments involved golden shiners, a fish prone to associating the color yellow with a food reward, Couzin said. The researchers trained groups of golden shiners to swim toward a blue target, while smaller groups were trained to follow their natural predilection for a yellow target. When the two groups were placed together, the minority's stronger desire for the yellow target dominated the group's behavior. As fish with no prior training (the uninformed individuals) were introduced, however, the fish increasingly swam toward the majority-preferred blue target, the researchers report.

"We think of being informed as good and being uninformed as bad, but that's a human construct. Animal groups are rarely in a fractious state and we see consensus a lot," said Couzin, who studies the behavior and communication behind animal movement, swarming and flocking.

"These experiments indicate there is an evolutionary function to being uninformed that perhaps is as active as being informed," he said. "Animals may be equally adaptable to simply going with the majority in certain circumstances because having that quick decision-making capability is beneficial for survival. We shouldn't think of it as a bad thing, but look at advantages animals exhibit to being uninformed in natural circumstances."

Donald Saari, a professor of mathematics and economics at the University of California-Irvine who studies voting systems, said he sees parallels to the Princeton-led work in markets and politics.

Highly informed economic forecasters and political activists frequently lose out to the masses of consumers and regular voters who base decisions on personal preferences and reasons more than on expertise, said Saari, who is familiar with the Science report but had no role in it.

For instance, he said, the arc from minority domination to pluralism to the potential degeneration into "noise," as described in the Princeton study, can be seen in the American electoral system.

A forceful minority can dominate in circumstances that attract the more politically inclined, such as midterm elections and primaries. In more popular elections, however, that influence wanes as less passionate people participate. Situations in which a candidate's personality or personal life takes precedent over policy positions in voters' minds could be an equivalent to the breakdown in direction Couzin and his co-authors found when there is a glut of uninformed individuals, Saari said.

"This study gives us a new interpretation of group decision making that really flies in the face of previous opinions. We usually assume that a highly opinionated and forceful group is going to sway everyone," Saari said.

"What we have we here is something very different," he said. "It doesn't say whether or not the consensus it good, it just provides a way of understanding when and how the consensus changes. If the numbers of the uninformed, or people who don't have a strong opinion, are large enough, that dilutes the effect of the highly opinionated or knowledgeable in the final outcome. Quite frankly, I think it's because the highly opinionated are not in the center and the uninformed, to a large extent, are."

Saari said that there might be an additional consideration or factor that uninformed individuals bring to the group process rather than mere devotion to the majority opinion.

"These results raise a lot of questions for me and present another way of thinking about and coming up with explanations for what we observe in group dynamics," he said.

"I think the effect the uninformed have is much more than just number-counting plurality and that they're offering something else," Saari said. "Why are the fish with no 'opinion' more effective toward taking the group toward plurality than the fish that only had some opinion? What is that additional dynamic, what are the real contributions of the uninformed? I don't know what it is, but I do know it's worth investigating."

The power of the uninformed in simulations and reality

The researchers developed three models that initially revealed and described how uninformed individuals restore popular power. The modeling work was based on a computational tool developed in Couzin's lab that predicts and explains animal group behavior based on various forms of social interaction among group members. Couzin first reported the model in the journal Nature in 2005.

For the current work in Science, Couzin worked with, from Princeton, second author Christos Ioannou, a former postdoctoral fellow in Couzin's lab who is now a research fellow at the University of Bristol; postdoctoral researcher Colin Torney and doctoral student Andrew Hartnett, both in Couzin's lab; and professors Simon Levin, the Moffett Professor of Biology and co-author of the 2005 Nature paper, and Naomi Leonard, the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The team also included Gven Demirel, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems; Thilo Gross, an engineering lecturer at the University of Bristol; and Larissa Conradt, a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge.

In this project, Couzin used his model to first simulate animal groups of different sizes with a majority and a minority population, each with a differing preference to move in a certain direction. He added the factor of how strongly the respective groups felt about their preference, a variable he could increase or decrease.

As expected, the researchers report, if the majority's preference was just as strong or stronger than the minority's, the group moved in the direction the majority favored. But when the intensity of the minority's preference increased, the animals as a whole frequently caved to that group's desires. In the groups with the strongest minority preference, the animals always went with the minority.

Couzin then added a third group, the uninformed, that had no preference on the direction to move. The model showed that even the presence of one or two uninformed individuals caused an immediate change in the group's behavior. The uninformed individuals were ultimately most effective in the groups with the least committed minority and those with the smallest total number of members. But even in groups with the most adamant minority, the majority took back control with less than 10 uninformed individuals present.

"Consensus naturally emerges in these models once uninformed individuals are introduced," Couzin said. "There is a sharp transition from minority to majority control. At a certain threshold, only a few uninformed individuals can alter the entire outcome of group decisions."

Mathematical models one created by Demirel and Gross, another by Torney helped explain the mysterious pull of the uninformed individuals. These models were based on social processes in human groups, such as how conventions become established, or how people influence each other's opinions, Couzin said.

The calculations indicated that during the decision-making process, all individuals have a tendency to follow what they perceive as the predominant view, but opinionated individuals are more resistant to social pressure, Couzin explained. This reluctance to compromise manipulates the perception of what is popular, meaning that the strong convictions of the minority can make their view seem dominant. Uninformed individuals, having no strong opinion or preference, tend to inhibit this process because they respond quickly to numerical rather than semantic differences and curb the influence of forceful individuals.

The models were used to design the experiments with the golden shiners, which Ioannou, who was not aware of the hypothesis being tested, conducted over a three-month period. The majority group of fish trained to swim toward the blue target consisted of six fish; five fish made up the strongly "opinionated" minority group, which was driven by a natural attraction to the color yellow.

As in the simulations, the minority group won out when uninformed individuals were not present and the fish swam toward the yellow target in slightly more than 80 percent of the trials where only the minority and majority groups were present.

The untrained fish, however, which were introduced in groups of five or 10, consistently put the group on course toward the blue target, Couzin explained. When five were added, the whole group went toward the blue target half the time. In trials with 10 untrained fish present, the fish made their way to the blue target nearly 70 percent of the time.

"We saw that the counterweight to a powerful minority can come from the least expected population the uninformed," Couzin said.

"It was extremely rewarding to see this counterintuitive prediction play out in reality with living organisms," he said. "Our work is a simplification of reality, but it allows the underlying mechanics of this type of decision making to be observed and understood."

###

The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Searle Scholars Program, the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research, the Royal Society and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency administered by the U.S. Department of Defense.


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Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/pu-lkm121311.php

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Meteorite shockwaves trigger dust avalanches on Mars

Friday, December 16, 2011

When a meteorite careens toward the dusty surface of the Red Planet, it kicks up dust and can cause avalanching even before the rock from outer space hits the ground, a research team led by an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona has discovered.

"We expected that some of the streaks of dust that we see on slopes are caused by seismic shaking during impact," said Kaylan Burleigh, who led the research project. "We were surprised to find that it rather looks like shockwaves in the air trigger the avalanches even before the impact."

Because of Mars' thin atmosphere, which is 100 times less dense than Earth's, even small rocks that would burn up or break up before they could hit the ground here on Earth crash into the Martian surface relatively unimpeded.

Each year, about 20 fresh craters between 1 and 50 meters (3 to 165 feet) show up in images taken by the HiRISE camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, is operated by the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and has been photographing the Martian surface since 2006, revealing features down to less than 1 meter in size.

For this study, the team zoomed in on a cluster of five large craters, which all formed in one impact event close to Mars' equator, about 825 kilometers (512 miles) south of the boundary scarp of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. Previous observations by the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, which imaged Mars for nine years until 2006, showed that this cluster was blasted into the dusty surface between May 2004 and February 2006.

The results of the research, which Burleigh first took on as a freshman under former UA Regents Professor H. Jay Melosh, are published in the planetary science journal Icarus. Previous studies had looked at dark or light streaks on the Martian landscape interpreted as landslides, but none had tied such a large number of them to impacts.

The authors interpret the thousands of downhill-trending dark streaks on the flanks of ridges covering the area as dust avalanches caused by the impact. The largest crater in the cluster measures 22 meters, or 72 feet across and occupies roughly the area of a basketball court. Most likely, the cluster of craters formed as the meteorite broke up in the atmosphere, and the fragments hit the ground like a shotgun blast.

Narrow, relatively dark streaks varying from a few meters to about 50 meters in length scour the slopes around the impact site.

"The dark streaks represent the material exposed by the avalanches, as induced by the the airblast from the impact," Burleigh said. "I counted more than 100,000 avalanches and, after repeated counts and deleting duplicates, arrived at 64,948."

When Burleigh looked at the distribution of avalanches around the impact site, he realized their number decreased with distance in every direction, consistent with the idea that they were related to the impact event.

But it wasn't until he noticed a pair of peculiar surface features resembling a curved dagger, described as scimitars, extending from the central impact crater, that the way in which the impact caused the avalanches became evident.

"Those scimitars tipped us off that something other than seismic shaking must be causing the dust avalanches," Burleigh said.

As a meteor screams through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound, it creates shockwaves in the air. Simulating the shockwaves generated by impacts on Martian soil with computer models, the team observed the exact pattern of scimitars they saw on their impact site.

"We think the interference among different pressure waves lifts up the dust and sets avalanches in motion. These interference regions, and the avalanches, occur in a reproducible pattern," Burleigh said. "We checked other impact sites and realized that when we see avalanches, we usually see two scimitars, not just one, and they both tend to be at a certain angle to each other. This pattern would be difficult to explain by seismic shaking."

In the absence of plate tectonic processes and water-caused erosion, the authors conclude that small impacts might be more important in shaping the Martian surface than previously thought.

"This is one part of a larger story about current surface activity on Mars, which we are realizing is very different than previously believed," said Alfred McEwen, principal investigator of the HiRISE project and one of the co-authors of the study. "We must understand how Mars works today before we can correctly interpret what may have happened when the climate was different, and before we can draw comparisons to Earth."

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University of Arizona: http://uanews.org

Thanks to University of Arizona for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116106/Meteorite_shockwaves_trigger_dust_avalanches_on_Mars

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